IIM Lucknow Starts Giving Consulting Services to Corporates

IIM Lucknow Starts Giving Consulting Services to Corporates

For a career like consulting, the biggest learning comes through the experience of working on live assignments. So to reduce that gap IIM Lucknow students led initiative "Aetius" have strived for getting live projects for students to work on. Aetius is just

an effort to concretize the efforts, and target corporate for projects through a more professional set-up. The initiative was kicked-off last week, with the launch of its first project for its client Zenesys, which makes Aetius as India's first ever student-run body, providing fee-based services to corporate clients and positioned along the concept of Consulting Clubs at foreign B-schools like Harvard.

IIM-L students have always been involved in live projects in fields ranging from banking, to logistics, from IT services to educational services. They have done projects for some big names like CitiFinancial to Cognizant, but at the same time, have done exciting work for start-ups like i-Maritime, as well consulted domestic industries like the leather and unorganized.

Although the objective was primarily the same, the approach was very different this time. It's a far professional system with the group working almost like a virtual company within the campus. Processes and guidelines for projects followed under this banner, includes: -

A rigorous selection process for people who work on the projects. In most cases, the client would himself decide on the people he wants to work on them. For example, Zenesys wanted people certified by it's "Management Consulting Workshop" to work on it's projects. So after a tough competition, 24 bright students were chosen by Zenesys who went through the workshop and would get to work on it's projects.

Compensation based on the amount of effort put in by the student on the work.

Most importantly, a thorough evaluation process, where the client would rate the student based on the quality of final output on a rating scale of 10.

"Moreover, the quality of projects that we hope to launch under this banner would be on the higher end of the value chain, and not restricted to back end research or analytics," says a member of Aetius team.

For students it's a terrific opportunity to do some real life consulting before they enter the corporate world. They get to learn interacting with best of clients, and a good rating is like an icing on the cake. Not to mention, the chance to earn a few bucks is an added bonus, says another team member of Aetius.

Aetius IIM-L students led initiative are having talks with several clients for a sustainable relation in terms of projects, apart from the one-off projects they get from some of the other firms. The first project from SIDBI, one of the many in the series of exciting projects in banking strategy, has also been launched. They are almost sure of closing in a couple of more projects in food processing, and alternate energy sector. Apart from that, they have 4-5 more projects in the pipeline for the coming month.

Concluded.

Contributed by -
Milton Singh & Sunil Singh,
Finesse PR.

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